Sugarland Guitarist Combines His Passions for Music and Running

Thad Beaty, 40, has completed two Ironman triathlons and one marathon, but he’s not quite sure how to approach his next endurance challenge. On October 11, a guitarist for the Grammy-winning country band Sugarland, will run the Denver Rock ’n’ Roll Marathon to raise money for charity, and he will stop and play a song with each of the bands along the route.

Beaty and race organizers are still ironing out the details, but Beaty says this could mean playing as many as 26 songs along the course, and he’s open to the idea of taking requests. He’ll recruit others to join him for part or all of the race to “make some beautiful noise.”

In contemplating his strategy, Beaty wondered if stopping to play a song each mile would mean that he could run quicker than his usual marathon pace between stops.

“I did my first test run [recently],” Beaty told Runner’s World Newswire. “We were in San Diego and just goofing around. I had a guitar and I’d been on a run, so I set it up on one end of a field…I could run faster, but then I realized once I get to the guitar, I’m breathing hard and shaking and so I can’t really play much of anything any good.”

Beaty says he and the race organizers are working together to “make sure all of our shenanigans will go off without a hitch.”

Beaty’s shenanigans will help him raise money for the Edith Sanford Breast Foundation. He describes the cutting-edge cancer research and treatment taking place at the Edith Sanford as “stirring” and “super cool.”

“Our goal is to raise enough money to get 10 women who are non-responders in traditional front-line treatment into the next level of genetic testing to have them going into trials,” Beaty said.

Fighting cancer is a cause near to Beaty’s heart. His mother and stepmother are cancer survivors, and his wife’s grandmother died of breast cancer in her 30s. His mother’s cancer diagnosis in 2009 caused Beaty to reevaluate his life and turn his health around.

Beaty was on tour when his mother called to say that she had been diagnosed with colon cancer.

“[My mother] presented it in a way that was as strong as it could be,” Beaty said. “But of course, once you hear, ‘Oh hey, I’m your mom and I have cancer,’ you fall apart. It kind of just knocked me off my feet.”

Despite being active up until he graduated from college, years of touring and eating four meals a day had caught up to Beaty. He carried 230 pounds on his 5-foot-10 frame, and he was having health problems, including high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and anxiety.

While in Los Angeles to promote Sugarland’s next record, Beaty and his now-wife, Annie Clements, the band’s bass player, came up with a plan for getting healthy.

“[We] kind of camped out in a hotel room for a number of days and I didn’t leave except to go play our shows,” Beaty recalls. “I just realized that enough’s enough, I gotta get this under control.”

He started with small steps: eliminating red meat, soda, and alcohol, and beginning to exercise.

“It was important to me to not think of living on a sacrifice, giving up everything. So it turned into something we called ‘crowding out.’ [It] was this idea of ‘Hey, if I eat more fruit, I have less room for cheesecake. If I eat more vegetables, I have less room for processed carbs,” Beaty says. “And one day I woke up and we’d just simply done that for a while and I’d lost about 70 pounds and was a vegan.”

Because running was the easiest form of exercise for him to do while touring, Beaty began running again, something he hadn’t done consistently since he was on the cross country team at Mississippi College, where he says he had to beg his way onto the team and that he “ended up being more of the mascot.”

Other challenges along the way caused Beaty to continue to reevaluate his life. Sugarland’s guitar tech, Kevin Quigley, was diagnosed with stage four lymphoma, and he passed away in March of 2012. In August of 2011, Beaty and his Sugarland band mates were under the stage at the Indiana State Fair, about to go onstage, when a giant wind storm swept through and caused the stage to collapse. Seven people died and dozens more were injured.

“For us as a whole, it was a pretty crazy kind of gut-wrenching time to go through that, to be scared to death about my mom, to know that our guitar tech is going through chemo and he’s struggling,” Beaty said. “And then now, to know that we’ve been a part of a show [where] people have lost their lives is devastating.”

Beaty fought those challenges with exercise. He added swimming and biking to his running, and in November of 2012, completed a full Ironman in Arizona. In conjunction with the race, he raised money for MusiCares, the organization that had helped pay Quigley’s medical bills during his battle with cancer.

A Natural Coach

Beaty learned that he liked taking on big challenges for causes larger than himself. He has also learned that he has a passion for helping others do the same.

Beaty has become a USA Triathlon certified coach, a Newton certified running coach, and a Spartan Race certified coach. And he doesn’t just hold the stopwatch. He gets involved with the athletes he coaches—going on 100-mile training rides, or doing track workouts with them.

It’s been about two years since Beaty was out on tour, which has given him more time at home in Nashville to help others achieve their goals.

“I’ve become really excited about helping people that just assume that they’re normal old folks realize that they can pull off some pretty spectacular and fabulous things, and it’s been so joyous to be able to dive into that,” Beaty said.

While Beaty doesn’t require the athletes he works with to fundraise for charities, he finds that most of them want to. A woman he worked with last year did an Ironman triathlon to raise money to fight melanoma, because her father had died of the disease.

“What happens is they end up performing better because they know what their ‘why’ is. They’re running and racing for something bigger than themselves, and they’re able to go out on those hard days and dig deeper because they’re doing it for something big,” Beaty said.

In late 2013 and early 2014, Beaty had the opportunity to serve as a trainer on the ABC show Extreme Weight Loss, where he helped Brandi Mallory go from weighing 329 pounds to completing a half Ironman triathlon and losing 151 pounds.

The experience was transformative for Mallory and Beaty. After coaching Mallory for months, Beaty completed a half Ironman with her. They finished last, long after most of the spectators and other competitors had gone home, but Beaty says that of all the medals he’s earned, he’s most proud of that one.

“There was something life-changing that happened to me to go through a race step-by-step with someone that only a number of months earlier would never, ever have guessed that they could do it,” Beaty said. “To be a part of not just that moment, [which has caused] a change in the trajectory of her entire life, has changed me at the core.

“She’s not just a finisher, she’s somebody that finished and now that has redefined who she is going forward,” Beaty continued. “I would encourage people to find somebody—somebody in your family, a friend—and encourage them to pull off something they don’t think they can do, and do it with them. Walk through it with them and you’ll never be the same.”

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